Any of my friends can tell you–I am addicted to using Foursquare. I check into just about any and every place I go, and I enjoy leaving tips and things to do in certain places for when others visit my destination.
Foursquare is a geo-locating application for your phone that allows you to broadcast via Twitter or Facebook your whereabouts. When you go somewhere, say a restaurant, you check into the establishment and others can see your location. You can privatize your settings by not having it broadcast on your social networks, and you can also check into a location as “off the grid”, meaning you checked in but are hiding your location.
When you check in, you earn points towards badges that you can earn for checking into specific places or a set amount of times. If you check into a location several times, you become the Mayor of that location, and some places, such as Nadoz Cafe here in St. Louis offer discounts and special offers to their Mayors.
You can also add friends much like you can on other social networking sites.
There are those that are leery with applications such as Foursquare which gives your location, but most of the time I am tweeting my whereabouts anyway so it doesn’t bother me. If I don’t want someone to know where I am, I don’t check in publicly.
Businesses are using Foursquare to display specials and to entice customers. When I was in New York City, there where times that when I checked in to a particular location, a button would appear that would tell me about a special a restaurant across the street was offering. It’s a great cross promotional tool. I also used Foursquare when I visited The Scholastic Store and received 20% off of my purchase for checking in there.
I’ve saved some money using Foursquare!
There are rumblings that Yahoo is planning to purchase Foursquare. I do not know what this means for the application, but I will continue to use it along with my other social networks.
So the question of the day is….do you Foursquare?
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